This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 5)

MIT Spinoff Liquid Debuts Non-Transformer AI Models and They’re Already State-of-the-Art
Carl Franzen | VentureBeat
“Not like most others of the present generative AI wave, these fashions are usually not primarily based across the transformer structure outlined within the seminal 2017 paper ‘Consideration Is All You Want.’ As an alternative, Liquid states that its purpose ‘is to discover methods to construct basis fashions past Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs)’ and with the brand new LFMs, particularly constructing from ‘first ideas…the identical manner engineers constructed engines, vehicles, and airplanes.’”

In Medical First, Woman’s Type 1 Diabetes Seemingly Cured by Stem Cells
Ed Cara | Gizmodo
“We would sometime be capable to have alternative insulin-making cells on demand. Scientists in China have offered early scientific trial information suggesting that an individual’s stem cells could be changed into a gentle provide of the pancreatic cells chargeable for producing insulin. If actually profitable, such a remedy would basically treatment Kind 1 diabetes.”

AI-Generated Images Can Teach Robots How to Act
Rhiannon Williams | MIT Know-how Evaluation
“Researchers from Stephen James’s Robotic Studying Lab in London are utilizing image-generating AI fashions for a brand new goal: creating coaching information for robots. They’ve developed a brand new system, known as Genima, that fine-tunes the image-generating AI mannequin Secure Diffusion to attract robots’ actions, serving to information them each in simulations and in the actual world.”

Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’
Somini Sengupta | The New York Occasions
“Britain, the nation that launched a worldwide habit to coal 150 years in the past, is shutting down its final coal-burning energy station on Monday. That makes Britain first among the many world’s main, industrialized economies to wean itself off coal—all of the extra symbolic as a result of it was additionally the primary to burn great quantities of it to gas the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the remainder of the world to observe swimsuit.”

Four-Legged Robot Learns to Climb Ladders
Brian Heater | TechCrunch
“The proliferation of robots like Boston Dynamics’ Spot has showcased the flexibility of quadrupeds. These techniques have thrived at strolling up stairs, traversing small obstacles, and navigating uneven terrain. Ladders, nonetheless, nonetheless current a giant challenge — particularly given how ever current they’re in factories and different industrial environments the place the techniques are deployed.”

Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again
Matt Reynolds | Wired
“The entire level of ARIA is to push researchers past their consolation zones and in the direction of concepts the sometimes risk-averse British science funding system would deem unbelievable or downright bizarre. …The plan needs to be simply on the sting of not possible, Gur tells the room. Impactful sufficient that it’s price a shot, however so formidable that half of the scientists go away the workshop satisfied it’ll by no means work.”

An ‘iPhone of AI’ Makes No Sense. What Is Jony Ive Really Building?
Sophie Charara | Wired
“LoveFrom is working with OpenAI to construct AI gadgets which are much less ‘socially disruptive’ than the iPhone. Is Ive on the lookout for absolution or a brand new computing soul? …There’s the sense…that LoveFrom has Apple-level expertise, as shut as it can get to Apple-level cash—with plans to lift as a lot as $1 billion in funding by the tip of this 12 months—and, with Sam Altman concerned, Apple-level ambitions.”

ART

Hidden ‘BopSpotter’ Microphone Is Constantly Surveilling San Francisco for Good Music
Jason Koebler | 404 Media
“Bop Spotter is a challenge by technologist Riley Walz wherein he has hidden an Android cellphone in a field on a pole, rigged it to be photo voltaic powered, and has set it to document audio and periodically sends it to Shazam’s API to find out which songs individuals are taking part in in public. Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, however for music. ‘That is tradition surveillance. Nobody notices, nobody consents. However it’s not about catching criminals,’ Walz’s web site reads. ‘It’s about catching vibes.’”

License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars
Matt Burgess and Dhruv Mehrotra | Wired
“Past highlighting the far-reaching nature of LPR know-how, which has collected billions of pictures of license plates, the analysis additionally exhibits how folks’s private political beliefs and their houses could be recorded into huge databases that may be queried. ‘It actually reveals the extent to which surveillance is going on on a mass scale within the quiet streets of America,’ says Jay Stanley, a senior coverage analyst on the American Civil Liberties Union.”

Moon Time Is a Thing Now—Here’s Why It Matters
Rebecca Boyle | Atlas Obscura
“Moon time is a significant factor to grasp, particularly as nations and personal corporations are angling to return to the lunar floor this decade. To grasp why moon time is so unusual—and why scientists just lately created a brand new and distinctive time zone only for the moon—we now have to spend a second with Einstein.”

Picture Credit score: Jigar Panchal / Unsplash